Somewhere I ll Find You (1942)

Having discovered that Clark Gable is to Lana Turner as flint is to steel, MGM has clashed them together again in "Somewhere I'll Find You," now at the Capitol, and let the sparks fall where they may. Again Mr. Gable is cast as the burly, untamed male that all women "throw themselves" upon and Miss Turner is the hapless young lady who tries it. As usual, Miss Turner has a virtuous alternative in Robert Sterling who is the steady sort, but Miss Turner has no patience with virtues. When he-man Gable walks in the door—only to walk out again—Miss Turner melts in a minute. "The heck with maidenly modesty," she remarks bravely at one point. "Confidence is what a girl needs." And so you have it, Mr. Gable and Miss Turner as a pair of newshawks in a global game of nip and tuck, a sort of emotional strip-tease that finds them kissing and running against a background of war in New York, Indo-China, Manila and finally, of course, Bataan.

For those whose pulses throbbed violently to the Gable and Turner osculations in "Honky Tonk" the Capitol's new film provides even more of the same. For "Somewhere I'll Find You" is the sort of synthetic fiction that has no other purpose than to exploit the respective charms of its twin stars. Mr. Gable is "bad news, poison" and the women love him for it. He even double-crosses his own mild-mannered brother—though not without a romantic assist from Miss Turner—until a streak of nobility causes him to renounce the young lady in favor of the other. A spirited girl, Miss Turner promptly disappears in Indo-China where she finds time to ferry Chinese urchins to safety until the brothers arrive and the old pursuit and counter-pursuit begins all over again, until it ends in a patriotic finale at Bataan.

But Mr. Gable's and Miss Turner's ardent romance has in it more box office logic than sensible human motivation; in the throes of a grand passion they seem only a notch above the children's pastime of "Post-Office." Miss Turner's love burned with a gemlike flame for three years after Mr. Gable "stood her up" on their first date. That sort of ardor indicates either the constitution of a Bruennhilde or a mind suffering from arrested development. The pair do well in the clinches but it still looks like puppy love to us.